Week 8: The Dust Settles

Time: 03/18-03/22, 15.5 hours

Topics: N/A

Tools: Laravel, Gatsby.

Summary:

On March 11th, Wheaton announced that they would be extending spring break until the 23rd of March and that the remainder of the semester would continue online. When I received this news I was home in SF and remember being flooded by mixed feelings. I had been looking forward to finishing the semester in Chicago and getting to know both my cohort and Woodlawn better, I was disappointed and felt small and fragile amidst such a global crisis. My parents and I decided the plan for the time was for me to return to Woodlawn and wait to hear back from Residence Life on my application to stay in WIC housing the remainder of the semester. Spring break ended sloppily, it was difficult for my parents to let me return to Illinois because of all the uncertainty. The day before I flew back to Chicago, My parents and I drove down to LA to pick up my sister who was moving out of her dorm at Harvey Mudd and moving in with my parents in SF. 

Those days are strange to look back on, so much time was spent in-between places, at airport gates, in the back seat of my grandmother’s van, in the bus rides between Midway and Woodlawn, in sad nocturnal commutes between Chicago and Wheaton. The apartment that I had grown to adore became strangely in-between as well. My first morning back in Woodlawn, I found out that I would have to move out as I wasn’t granted permission to stay in College housing. My parents and I decided the best place for me would be with my Mother’s side of the family in Toronto because the apartment in San Francisco was too small. I hastily packed up my belongings and organized everything into 3 piles: the items I would bring with me to Toronto, the items I would be storing over the summer in Wheaton, and things that I wanted to have access to just in case I moved back to Illinois for the summer. Moving out was abrupt and unnatural. A dear friend drove out from Wheaton to help me move out and if not for him I don’t think I would have made my flight to Toronto. I remember crushing a lightbulb in my hand trying to twist it off a lamp in Woodlawn, bandaging my cut fingers, feeling strangely detached later when my wounds made security at O’hare a nightmare.

Waking up in Toronto at my aunts on the 18th I could take a deep breath. Decisions had been made so quickly, everything had been so rushed, I felt odd waking up and joining my relatives for breakfast that morning. With a week before classes resumed, I wanted to make the most of my extra time so I worked on a few Jira tasks that seemed within my skill set:

• In Laravel, using Vue, I added a hover over tooltip to Wunderite the app that displayed additional helpful info for confusing hazard terms like “ice dam index”, “earthquake”, and “flood zone”.

• I changed the text on the login page for account creation to be different from simply logging in.
• I updated the Techstars logo to match its redesign for the marketing site.